DES MILLÉNAIRES D’ABSENCE

Philippe Rouy
DES MILLÉNAIRES D’ABSENCE / THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF ABSENCE)
France 2025, 117’

With the presence of the director

In 2011, short after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, a group of Japanese filmmakers was formed with the aim of filming all 6,852 islands of the archipelago. The collective were highly active for more than two years, but then all trace of them was lost. Until, in 2024… Made of two distinct segments, Rouy’s film combines political reflection, sentiment, and documentary. The first part was shot with a camera obscura, giving images a softened texture, which contrasts with the impassive gaze of the island-films. “Ukishima is a fictional entity created by and for the film. But part of the 6,852 island-films it seeks to archive now genuinely exists. I made them. The film also taught me much about the power of fiction (a form I had never worked with before), especially its capacity to seep into reality - even to produce it. By following in the imagined footsteps of this fictional collective, by filming the Japanese islands from its imagined point of view, I found myself preceded by the fiction. I could not escape it. I could only document it - until my own bearings began to blur.” (Philippe Rouy)